Rener Gracie has been advocating for cops to learn Jiu-Jitsu for an incredibly long time now and he’s even gone so far as to push for national police reform that includes mandatory training in Jiu-Jitsu. This is a movement that one of the most famous Gracie family-members has been at the forefront of for quite some time and is finally starting to gain traction with mainstream audiences. It’s taken years of hard work from hundreds of people to get to this point but teaching police officers Jiu-Jitsu is something that’s finally being put into practice in some areas and is open for discussion at the highest levels of decision-making.
There’s still one hurdle that proponents of this plan are struggling to overcome and it’s a point that those against it are prone to making during the discussion. If there is such a thing as a “bad cop”, should we really be teaching them more effective ways of controlling and disabling potential suspects? Could this be a decision that actually increases the potential for instances of police brutality instead of decreasing it as Rener Gracie and plenty of other Jiu-Jitsu practitioners would argue?
Well, Rener has just uploaded a video to the official YouTube channel for GracieBreakdown in which he attempts to address these concerns head on. He makes the very important point that we already arm police officers with batons, tasers, and even guns, all of which are certainly more likely to be lethal than an unarmed but effectively trained officer. Alongside this, evidence produced from recent Jiu-Jitsu programs for officers shows that the total number of use-of-force incidents actually decreases, something that Rener has always believed would happen when officers are more confident in their abilities.
